Memory

A History

Edited by Dmitri Nikulin

Description

In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept of memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions. Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical, political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment. Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning and transformations throughout its own history.

Memory

A History

Edited by Dmitri Nikulin

Author Information

Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His interests range from ancient philosophy and early modern science to the philosophy of dialogue and philosophy of history.

Contributors:

Francesco de Angelis is Associate Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. His areas of research include art and cultural memory; the interaction between spaces, images, and social practices; and the modern reception of classical art. He has published widely in the Roman, Etruscan, and Greek fields. Among other things, he is the author of Miti greci in tombe etrusche: Le urne cinerarie di Chiusi (2013) and the editor of Spaces of Justice in the Roman World (2010).

Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, and video artist based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her interests range from seventeenth-century to contemporary art and modern literature, to feminism, migratory culture, and mental illness. Her books include Of What One Cannot Speak (2010) and A Mieke Bal Reader (2006).

Sven Bernecker is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. His main areas of research are epistemology, metaphysics,and philosophy of mind. He is the author of Reading Epistemology (2006), The Metaphysics of Memory (2008), and Memory: A Philosophical Study (2010). He is the editor, with Fred Dretske, of Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology (2000), and, with Duncan Pritchard, The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2011).

Xia Chen is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, China. She specializes in Chinese philosophy and religion and is the author of Studiesof Daoist Moral Tracts (1999), and the editor of The Principles of the Study of Religions (2003)and Studies of Daoist Ecological Thought (2010).

Stephen Clucas is Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History at Birkbeck University of London. He is the editor (together with Stephen Gaukroger) of Intellectual History Review, and is currently co-editing Thomas Hobbes' De corpore for the Clarendon edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. His publications include the English translation of Paolo Rossi's seminal work on the art of memory, Logic and the Art of Memory (2000), and Magic, Memory and Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (2011).

Ludovico Geymonat is Marie Curie Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, Italy. He studied art history at the Università di Torino and Princeton University (PhD, 2006). He has published on painting in early fourteenth-century Venice, the Baptistery at Parma, and the Wolfenbüttel Musterbuch. His research focuses on medieval drawings, monumental painting, and the role of space in visual communication.Axel Honneth is Professor of Philosophy at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and at Columbia University. Since 2001, he has served as Director of the Institute for Social Research. His publications include: The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1990), The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (1995), Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange (co-authored with Nancy Fraser, 2003),Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2007), Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (2009); The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory (2010); The I in We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (2012); and most recently,Freedom's Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (2014).

Jörn Müller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Würzburg. He specializes in ancient and medieval philosophy. His most recent book is Willensschwäche in Antike und Mittelalter (2009). He has edited several anthologies, including a collection of commentaries on Plato's Phaedo (2011) and a volume on Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics (2013).

Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His interests range from ancient philosophy and early modern science to the philosophy of dialogue and philosophy of history. He is the author of a number of books including Matter, Imagination and Geometry (2002), On Dialogue (2006), Dialectic and Dialogue (2010), and Comedy, Seriously (2014).

Michael Rothberg is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009) and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) with Neil Levi.

Daniel L. Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has authored over 350 publications concerning human memory. His books Searching for Memory (1996) and The Seven Sins of Memory (2001) were both named New York Times Notable Books of the Year and won the American Psychological Association's William James Book Award.

Nicolas de Warren is Research Professor in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and the Husserl Archives at KU Leuven. He is the author of Husserl and the Promise of Time (2009) and has published widely in phenomenology, aesthetics, and modern philosophy. He is currently writing a book on the unforgivable in Vladimir Jankélévitch. He is also co-editor of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology (Springer).

Eli Zaretsky is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Capitalism, theFamily and Personal Life (1976), Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (2004), and Why America Needs a Left (2013).His forthcoming work is tentatively entitled Political Freud.

Memory

A History

Edited by Dmitri Nikulin

Reviews and Awards

"This is a rich collection and valuable for anyone seeking to explore the dependence of recent developments in memory studies on philosophical thought...What Memory: A History decisively demonstrates is that our current obsession with memory has a history." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online

"The resulting historico-reflective account of the philosophical concept of memory offers a comprehensive treatment of the topic that has grown into an interdisciplinary discourse dominating the humanities today." -- Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal